Stupid slogan ideas:
1. Meeting all your needs.
This is a search for stupidity. Shut up about the “meeting all your [insert product or service here] needs”. Get a real slogan.
2. Mentioning the word product
“The new Burger King quarter pounder product. The best tasting product our corporation has ever produced for the consumer.” That was stupid.
3. Logos with circles in them
Anything in a circle is retarded.
Nothing has changed but I feel better.
08:32am — Newark, NJ
I’ve never been religious, my friends all know that I’m agnostic for the most part. So I was really surprised yesterday when the craziest thing happened! I was walking downtown thinking all this God stuff when suddenly I was surrounded by shining light! It was Jesus! He had a Mag flashlight and he was waving it all around while making ghost noises like, “ooOOOOooooo”. It was really a neat effect. With the flashlight and the creepy noises and all …
So instead of grabbing lunch, I thought I’d talk to Him. He didn’t seem to be doing much more than a street act. I said, “Hey Christ! How’s it hangin’?” He said, “Oh hey Chris! I was wondering where you were. Just kidding. I know everything.”
We both laughed but didn’t really have much to talk about after that. He already knew.
I basically just followed him around although I told him I wasn’t going to be a follower. He didn’t seem to care one way or another. We stopped by a wedding and watched the ceremony. Jesus said sometimes he likes to watch an entire wedding himself just to make the whole “married in front of God” thing really literal.
I asked Him, “so what about all those other religions? I mean sure you are the most popular, but there are many others. Who’s right and who’s wrong?” He said, “what do you mean wrong? Mohammad lives in downtown Dallas, Buddha is in Sweden on holiday and enlightenment is in a fresh Krispy Kreme donut.” With that remark he let out a glorious laugh. “Just kidding, he’s in a studio apartment in East Village on 7th Avenue NYC.”
I was extremely surprised to find out that enlightenment could afford to live downtown. But I wasn’t really in a mood to question He who hath created everything.
“So how hard was it to create the Earth and the Heavens?” I asked Him. Jesus looked very annoyed, “Hey! Do I remind you of long hours working a Calculus paper trying to figure out the area of a curve? No!” I didn’t say anything. Jesus calmed down and looked sorry that he snapped at me. Then he said, “It’s just … well … it was a long week. And even if you are all-powerful, it doesn’t mean it’s like a TV dinner.”
I dropped the subject.
Then we stopped by a used CD store. To my surprise, he went right for the death metal section. I shouted in horror, “Jesus! Why are you into Celtic Frost, the black metal band?” He replied, “because they talk about the issues that are important to me. I mean, most people love Me just to save their own asses. If death wasn’t an issue, My God club wouldn’t be very popular now would it?”
Jesus and I casually thumbed through the CDs together even though we both knew that we weren’t going to buy anything. People approached us and said stuff like “Hey, aren’t you that Jesus guy?” or “Dude, I totally just spilled my latte all over your robe” or “gesundheit. Oops, I mean, bless you.”
I was impressed. I mean, here I was getting all these big questions answered that mankind have thought about for thousands of years with no answer and all I could think about was a grilled fillet of fish from McD’s.
It’s true! They totally do!
I hate my mom! She’s such a bitch! High school sucks! Blink 182! Everything! Yay!
Do you want to drive my mom’s minivan to adolecent practice? Sure! I’ll bring popular music! That sounds great to my teenage ears! I’m caught in a fake sterotype paragraph!! Aaahh!!
Hormones! Temporary friends, school and life! We totally get no respect. The OC is way off. But I love everything on the WB! Hey, have you seen my minimum wage job around here? I think I left it next to my oxy pads!!
The prom!
Teen mags!
Teen TV!
Driver’s ed!
Gym!
Product placement by models twice our age!
795 ways to look amazing at the prom!
Zero ways to get your innocence back!
“I invited my crush over to watch TV. We were sitting on the couch and started kissing, when I suddenly had the urge to sneeze. When I did, a huge glob of snot flew out of my nose and landed on his shirt. He gave me a strange look, then said, ‘You are a very interesting girl!’ and quickly left. That was my worst date ever!”
~Jamie, Pt. St. Lucie, FL
French class!
Oh, you’re taking Spanish!?
Something else teenager-esque!
Someone grow me up with an age bomb!!
Scrunchies rule!
While I was waiting for some work stuff to finish on a server, I ran out to Starbucks and got a coffee. I had set up the server to email me on my cell phone when it was done. I headed back to the office at a leisurely pace since I hadn’t received any email on my cell. As I entered the lobby, I noticed a small sparrow hopping along the marble floor.
There’s no clear exit or opening the the lobby. I wondered how this bird could have gotten in. I looked at one set of glass doors and noticed that one of the doors was propped open by no apparent force. Maybe the wind had blown it open and the hinges were stuck … I don’t know.
I attempted to herd the bird towards the malfunctioning, but open, door of freedom. The bird lazily avoided me and made some amount of progress towards the outside. But then, sensing danger, suddenly jumped straight up and flew into a lobby flower bed.
I sipped my coffee not saying anything. No one was around. I had a server and a stressful day waiting for me upstairs. I could leave the bird, likely to die, and continue my day. Or I could finish my coffee, rinse out my starbucks cup and attempt to trap the bird in the cup. The frappuccino cup looked like it would work as a safe and functional bird transport.
The bird walked along a grate behind the lobby flower bed, probably taking comfort in the bits of mulch that were scattered about. I sipped my coffee with greater purpose. The bird continued walking along the grate heading towards the door. I sipped my coffee with anticipation and tried to herd it out the door again. But it got scared by my advances and fluttered back away from the door near an open spot in the grate.
Then the bird promptly dropped down into the metalic underworkings of the lobby flower bed. Now I had a challenge on my hands. Looking at the grate pieces, I saw that they could be removed. However, I realized if there was any kind of fox hole or a/c duct in this service trough, the bird would likely be inaccessible and would be doomed to starve to death.
I finished up my coffee and rinsed the cup out in the Men’s bathroom. I couldn’t possibly sit in front of a Unix terminal now. I returned to the flower bed and removed all of the plastic grates from on top of the service trough. The bird was now wide eyed looking up at me from within this very awkward manmade place. I herded it into a corner of this trough and tried scooping it up into the Starbucks cup. It was captured but as I brought it up out of the trough, it jumped out and back into the dark corners of safety.
With thoughts of religion, life, sentience I drove too far into the moment. I realized that here I am, a human being, trying to help this bird and it is not allowing me to help. I can’t possibly explain to the bird that I am not trying to eat it. It understands nothing more than being prey and surviving the situation. Ironically, I felt like I was the only way to survive the situation. I continued to try, adopting a “Daddy Knows Best” posture.
I cornered the sparrow again. I made a few slow misses with my cup and then I had the sparrow captured again! The bird was incredibly light. The cup felt no heavier with the bird in it. Such a contrast to my 155 lbs self.
Leaning over the various flowers and dirt I worked the lid on slowly and carefully while the bird flapped helplessly in the plastic container. I had a bird in my cup as I marched outside. I passed a building worker as I went outside and I showed him my prize. He was smiling as I explained where the bird came from. Without further delay I released the bird into an ivy patch on the ground and the sparrow flew off around the corner of the building without effort. I was happy to see it unharmed.
So the sparrow is free and probably hunting worms at this moment. And I can’t leave this event to rest. Because you could, if you like, read a lot into it. You could read it one of two ways:
1) There is a God with a Starbucks cup trying to save us. There is a divine being that tries to save us although we are a million times too stupid to understand his mechanics for doing so. We flee in horror at his attempts to scoop us up. We can’t prove to each other that he exists. How can this bird possibly talk with me directly? How could this bird possibly explain plastics, polymers, arms and human intent to its bird friends? This bird probably doesn’t even have any “bird friends”. We are completely and totally different organisms and trying to relate us is completely impossible.
2) There isn’t a God and what happened simply happened. Karma, sin, redemption could be a natual consequence of other human opinions. If I stomped the bird to death, I’d probably feel bad. If someone saw me stomp the bird to death, I’d probably get a bad name. Is that it?
If there isn’t a God, why save the bird? Why do anything good? I look at it like this. I don’t need to kill the bird. The bird is a wild animal. It belongs outside. It does not want to be inside (although it might not know this). I feel a need to resolve this conflict as a person. People don’t want conflict. People want resolution from tension. So I save the bird. Harmony (in this aspect) is restored and I am satisfied.
If there is a God (or other deity), I hope that by some technicality I satisfy it/him/her by my gesture. At least, by all means of reason and proof, there is a bird still alive.
We have a single bathroom in our place with a single faucet. My cat (a kitten, really) continually jumps on the sink and meows to me begging me to turn on the faucet. But I can’t just turn on the faucet to any strength or pressure. It has to be a certain and exact flow of water.
The flow of water she desires is so that the water looks like a solid spun column of glass. You know, the strength right before the drip. Any more pressure would induce bubbles and air into the water making a sort of racket. That doesn’t really interest her. She wants a single column of cold wet glass to play with.
She’ll stare at this water column actually trying to reason it out. She’ll yank her head back as if she’s being told a loaf of bread is 3 million dollars; like she’s confused. Then she’ll dip her head down and drink for a bit. Then she’ll stop and bat at the water.
Of course, I’m a lot smarter than that because I have a higher developed nervous system, right? Of course! With all great confidences we can state that this beast is far less superior to answer such a question.
But hat exactly *do I really understand about water*? I mean I know it’s a liquid and I could probably describe some properties about water. Is that knowing what it is? Even the dictionary could no more explain what my cat is seeing than explain the color “red” to a blind man.
“Oh, red is very bright. Well, it’s racey. A red car looks fast. A red dress is sexy. Stop lights are red. Red makes bulls angry.” I doubt very much that a blind man would understand what red is from any explaination. Such is my cat stuck with not knowing.
As my cat tries to figure the stream of water out, I think that if I played with a stream of water, I could draw no more about that water is than she could. It’s wet, it moves around when you hit it and it’s cold.
I’d just end up in some Zen-like defeat, “Geez, it’s just water cat.”
You’re playing super mario brothers and you get a green mushroom. A bit of text rises up, “1UP”, your lives go up by one. You move on. What did you just see? What does 1UP mean?
There was no google search that answered my question well. I found a forum posting of someone asking this exact question with no response. It wasn’t until I went to dictionary.com, which linked to acronymfinder.com that my question was answered.
1UP means ‘first universal player’. Interesting. I thought for sure that it would mean ‘one user player’ (vs CP=computer player) or maybe 1st user player. But ‘first universal player’ is the best I could find. There’s 1up.com and countless other gaming references to the phrase. I would have been interested in a history of the term but haven’t found one yet.
GAME OVER
Network Solutions (aka: Verisign)has got to be the worst company ever. This isn’t some idle rant some a customer who spent too much time on hold. I present to you, current and witnessable evidence of their “live” product that represents the bloated, misdirected and disorganized business.
Network Solutions is an Internet company. They sell domain names, SSL certificates, web hosting space and other ‘vaporware de jure’. But a lot of other companies sell these products too. You can buy a domain name from a lot of places. You buy domain names from a lot of better places in fact. Godaddy.com is a better place to buy a domain. Verisign *will* piss you off and has pissed you off.
So how are they in business? They’ve made plenty of screw ups in the past. Did you ever read about *their own* SSL cert expiring? They sat on the problem and didn’t do anything about their soon to expire SSL certificate and ended up taking down norton.com. They certainly aren’t making many friends by doing stuff like that. I personally have had two web sites in my professional life affected by that SSL mistake. From what I read, they knew about it and either didn’t fix it because they are lazy or too bloated of a company.
Since I’ve known netsol, they’ve riden the dot com wave and bust and I honestly think it has everything to do with timing. They’re expanding to TV, wireless, messaging and it’s all going to suck just as much as Verisign’s inability to design a simple DNS management web app. Somehow they employ some key people and have the cash flow to venture out into experimental areas like this. I think it has something to do with their $19/year transfer fee. Godaddy is $8 and it’s better.
I know people who have worked for them and they’ve told me that they are just as hard to be employees with as customers. They are making improvements but Network Solutions horrible improvements are only modestly closing the competitive gap.
Their old DNS registration system was an email address that you sent a form off to. If you mistyped anything on the form, the parser on the other end wouldn’t have the slightest clue as to what you are talking about.
I tried using this system but ended up calling my friend who used to work for netsol to have him just do it. He agreed that system was completely useless. DNS is important, ask any IT guy. I can’t believe a major DNS registrar relied on simple email forms. It’s incredible to think about the probable hundreds of thousands of domains that were registered in this way.
Behold! Image #1.
This is a picture of network solutions DNS registration page. This is their shiney new interface that replaces their archaic email parsing system. Note that it gives you a fantastic choice of either losing something or being “advanced”. Most people just want a “non-advanced” domain name that they can run themselves. Netsol tries to trick you into picking the “advanced” section which would cost you more money.
This concept of “tricking” while people are in production / in business / live on the Internet reminds me of a car salesmen asking “do you want to not, not buy the brakes and the seatbelt now that we are going 100mph?”
If you do decide to go your own way, they make it very clear that you are making a huge mistake and risking everything you know.
Behold! Image #2.
Choose the “NetSol” way and we’re still confused as to what we’re getting into. Are we making a mistake? Can I be assured that my CEO is going to get his email? Is this worth my job Net Sol?
I’ve already migrated all of the domains both personal and professional to godaddy.com who I have had excellent, consistent and cheaper service with. Die Network Solutions. Go out of business already.
More and more people are getting on the web. More and more people are gaining experience with computers. We have not seen yet what people with 30 years of experience with the web are like. No one has 30 years of experience with the web. There are no retired, 62 year old web designers out there. The amount of experienced web professionals is lacking compared to the amount of experienced doctors or other long-standing professions.
As people explore the web, bookmark sites, use better and more catagorized search engines; the web becomes smaller because people are surfing for official, professional and you could say ‘high quality’ content.
So people have a propensity to certain sites. Bookmarks, favorites. Since weblogs are unusually personal websites, then I say that people are most likely to read and come back to weblogs that align with their already existing personal traits.
Really people have a tendancy to flock with people like themselves. People like mirrors. People like http://localhost. Hug yourself. Talk to yourself. You’re the most interesting person you’ll know.
*sigh*